Kreyol gets a spelling and the majority gets a written language

In 1978 the Institut Pedagogique National issued a standard written form of Kreyol. Nine Haitians in ten spoke it and nothing else, and until then it had no agreed spelling, which meant no textbooks, no literacy campaign and no way of teaching children in the language they actually used. A first Kreyol text had appeared in 1925 and a first Kreyol newspaper in 1943, but writing the language remained a private decision taken word by word. The orthography settled that. A government decree in 1979 allowed public education to be conducted in Kreyol, and the constitution of 1987 made it an official language of the republic alongside French. The sequence is worth holding on to. A language that grew up among enslaved people on the plantations of Saint-Domingue, and that the families who ran the country after independence treated as proof of backwardness, was given a spelling, then a classroom, then legal standing, inside nine years.

Drought settled over the Sahel from the early 1970s and held, from Mauritania and Mali east to Sudan and Ethiopia. Famine followed, and it fell on countries already fighting civil wars or moving their own farmers by force. By the 1980s agriculture sat at the centre of the crisis. Several states had become net importers of food and depended on aid to buy it. Land grew scarce, farmers pushed into pasture and into ground that made them ill, and herders and cultivators fought over what was left. The young left for the cities, and slums spread around Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Political sovereignty had arrived without economic sovereignty. Populations watched their governing elites take what there was, welcomed the coups of the 1960s and 1970s, then watched the soldiers fail as well. By the early 1990s governments were accepting structural adjustment from the IMF and the World Bank: shrink the state, free trade and currency, and take instruction on the rest.

Haiti Observateur, the oldest newspaper of the Haitian community in New York, was founded in 1971. In that first year it carried seven classified advertisements. By 1978 it averaged more than fifty. Pierre-Louis reads the count as a measure of an exile population turning into a settled one, with businesses to advertise and customers to reach. The same years produced the Bottin, a Haitian business directory published from the 1970s into the 1990s, and L'Heure Haitienne, a radio programme broadcast every Sunday from Columbia University with offices in Flatbush, which became the flagship entertainment of the exiles. The Haitian Fathers, Holy Ghost priests expelled by Francois Duvalier in the early 1960s, taught Kreyol classes and published a magazine written entirely in that language. Cultural associations wrote songs about a Haiti that would be beautiful once it was free.

Gus Pantel re-excavated several important stone tool sites in the Caribbean in 1975 and 1976, meaning to describe their assemblages properly. He found that large blades became more common the deeper he dug, which implies that toolmaking changed over time. He also found that saying when was close to impossible. Modern building and erosion had disturbed many of the deposits, so the layers no longer sat in the order they were laid down. At some sites stone tools turned up together with pottery, which is awkward, because Caribbean archaeology had split the islands' past into an Archaic age of stone and a Ceramic age of pots. Mixed deposits mean either that the two overlapped or that the ground has been churned, and often there is no way to decide between them. Pantel's report is still cited for that problem. The tidy sequences printed in textbooks rest on fewer undisturbed sites than most readers assume.